Tuning In to His Vision of a New KCET

Driving his Ford Explorer up a Los Feliz street on the way to lunch, Al Jerome, the incoming president of KCET-TV Channel 28, marvels at a stately lineup of palm trees. “Now this is Southern California,” he exclaims. “I love the foliage.”

A native New Yorker and a jazz musician’s son, the trim, boyish 53-year-old executive, who moved here last August, spent the bulk of his career in commercial broadcasting, primarily at NBC. Yet he brings at least as much exuberance to his new role as head of Southern California’s flagship public-television station, where he starts on Thursday, as he does to the place he now calls home.

He also brings a fresh eye.

“At the risk of sounding like too much of a newcomer,” Jerome notes at the table, “sometimes I feel a little bit like the kid who gets let into the candy store after hours. There are so many exciting things that are happening and you just kind of drink it in. . . .

“When I begin on the 1st,” he adds congenially, “we’ll get down to the business of running the place.”

On Wednesday, William H. Kobin, KCET’s longtime chief executive, whom Jerome did not meet until the day of his appointment, retires after 13 years. Jerome, who had dinner with Kobin that night, is quick to pay tribute. “Bill Kobin has done a fine job of running this station, and I hope to be able to continue it and maybe build upon it a little bit.”

Jerome is coming to KCET with a batch of big-picture ideas, from programming to marketing. Already he sounds at ease with the buzzwords familiar around the station lot in Hollywood in recent years: “entrepreneurial,” “strategic alliances” and “lifelong learning experience.”

This is a man brimming with self-confidence. If one suggests that moving from commercial to public broadcasting might be a bit tough, he says otherwise: “All television stations have certain similarities. They perform common functions. They put programs on the air. A commercial station will put on a newscast. KCET will put on ‘Life & Times’ that relates to current events. . . .”

Jerome, who moved to Agoura Hills last year because his wife’s family lives there, admires “Life & Times” so much that he would like to extend the 30-minute nightly show to an hour--if he can find funding. He also wants to expand its documentary portion. “Instead of having one documentary a week, or two, we should have more.”

Perhaps a separate documentary program? “It depends,” he replies with a laugh. “ ‘It depends’ is a great answer [for] ‘I don’t know.’ Give me the money and we can do anything.”

A 1964 graduate of Cornell, where he majored in history and also pitched for the varsity baseball team, and of the New York University Graduate School of Business in 1966, where his master’s thesis was on pay TV, Jerome says that when he thinks back upon his “original objectives for getting into the television business--to educate, to inform, to motivate people, to have a lifelong learning experience--this is like nirvana.”

KCET is Jerome’s third major career shift. He spent 17 years with NBC, running stations in Chicago and New York and serving, from 1982 to 1991, as president of NBC’s station division, which included KNBC-TV Channel 4. Then he went to Dallas, where from late 1991 through 1994 he was president of SpectraVision, the leading provider of interactive information and entertainment services to the hotel industry. In that capacity, he became familiar with the new world of digital technology that will impact all of television.

His immediate priority, he says, is “learning about KCET and public television. I’m going to have to sit down with our staff and understand a little bit more about what we’re doing every day. . . . I really want to understand who they are, what their passions are.

“I also would like to get to know the people at the corporations and the foundations which underwrite KCET,” he continues. “I would like to get to know some of the major donors. I would like to get to know the inner workings of the membership drive because we have one coming up in March. I want to have conversations with some major-market public-television general managers, with [PBS President] Ervin Duggan and his staff.

“Certainly at the end of 30 days, I hope to accomplish that, and at the end of 60 days to understand the membership drive and see what kind of comments we get. And then I think I’ll have a good platform going into our budget meetings in April.”

It’s with those key budget decisions that KCET will set priorities for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. “It would be good to look at every project,” Jerome adds, “to see if we’re getting the most out of it.”

He says KCET needs to “look at joint ventures and partnerships with program providers and technology providers.” He talks about collaborating on new children’s programming for the PBS schedule “with a commercial broadcast network or an entertainment company. A scenario in which we could obtain funding for a program we wanted to produce. And if the series lends itself to merchandising initiatives, there would be an entrepreneurial back end for all parties.”

He talks about the need for more local programming. And for bringing original drama back to KCET. “We sit here in the middle of the entertainment capital of the world, and it would seem to me this is a role KCET should play.

“Maybe what I would like to try to do is to explore bridges that can be built between KCET as the gateway into public television with some of the major providers--any studio, any television production company. These are joint ventures you’d have to work on. They are very complex negotiations. This is blue sky, but a lot of times strategic alliances can be built because you get together with the right people and say, ‘I’d like to do something with you. Let’s talk.’

“When I was in Chicago at WMAQ in the late ‘70s,” Jerome continues, “we decided to run a contest for playwrights, and the winner would get his or her play done. Today it’s a much more expensive proposition but certainly you want to bring it to a foundation. . . . Maybe we could bring [in] major talent to do something they’re not doing today--whether it’s a motion picture star or a producer who always wanted to do this project but needed the right venue.”

Jerome calls public television “a priceless jewel,” one whose value he has observed not only as a TV executive but also as a parent. He and his wife, Michele, have a son, Zack. (Jerome also has two grown sons from his first marriage.)

“It’s hard to quantify the value that my wife and I got, and our son got, from watching children’s programs like ‘Sesame Street,’ ‘Electric Company,’ ‘Reading Rainbow,’ ” he says. “And it’s worth a lot to the society to have an independent voice that can take a ‘Frontline’ documentary or a ‘P.O.V.’ and delve into an issue without regard to the commercial sponsors.”

Today is a big day in the Jerome household. Zack, 13, is being bar-mitzvahed.